The lost Atlantis, and other ethnographic studiesWilson, Daniel, Sir
History
The lost Atlantis, and other ethnographic studies
Wilson, Daniel, Sir
America -- Antiquities; Atlantis (Legendary place); Ethnology -- America; Indians of North America -- Antiquities
The disclosures of Dr. Abbott claim a special importance among the
fruits of archæological investigation on the American continent, not
only from the fact that they furnish the first well-authenticated
results of systematic research based on the scientific analogies of
European archæology, but these later results have included the remains
of man himself. When Dr. Usher of Mobile contributed to _The Types of
Mankind_ an account of the discovery of a human skeleton at New Orleans,
found under circumstances from which the existence of man in the delta
of the Mississippi was deduced well nigh sixty thousand years ago, it
was scarcely calculated to win the reader’s acceptance of that
assumption when it was added that “the type of the cranium was, as might
have been expected, that of the aboriginal American race.” Nor is this
the only example of skull of a strictly modern Indian type from which
the inference has been drawn that the same unchanging form has prevailed
from the era of pre-glacial American man till now. Three human crania
found in the Trenton gravel are now in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge
(Harvard). All are of the same type, but it differs essentially from
that of the Red Indian skull. They are of small size, oval, and present
a striking contrast to all other skulls in the Peabody collection. Their
value is due to the fact of their discovery in the implement-bearing
gravel, in proximity to the characteristic examples of what are assumed
to be palæolithic celts. For it is well for us to bear in remembrance
that the evidences of the antiquity of man in Europe do not rest on any
number of chance disclosures. It is a simple procedure to dig into a
Celtic or Saxon barrow, and find there the implements and pottery of its
builders lying alongside of their buried remains. But archæologists have
learned to recognise the palæolithic implements as not less
characteristic of certain post-pliocene deposits than the palæontology
of the same geological formation. The river-drift and cave deposits are
characterised by traces of contemporaneous life, as shown in the
examples of primitive art from which they receive the name of the
tool-bearing drift or gravel; just as older geological formations have
their characteristic animal and vegetable fossils. The specific
character of the tool-bearing gravel of the French Drift having been
determined, geologists and archæologists have sought for flint
implements in corresponding English strata, as they would seek for the
fossils of the same period, and with like success. Palæolithic
implements have been recovered in this manner in Suffolk, Bedford,
Hartford, Kent, Middlesex, Surrey, and other districts in the south of
England. So entirely indeed has the man of the Drift passed beyond the
province of the archæologist, that in 1861 Professor Prestwich followed
up his _Notes on Further Discoveries of Flint Implements in Beds of
Post-Pleiocene Gravel and Clay_, with a list of forty-one localities
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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